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‘Four course compost’

Compost made from the waste of high end San Francisco restaurants is spread through the vineyards at the Bouchaine winery in Napa, Calif., last month. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Associated Press
Compost made from the waste of high end San Francisco restaurants is spread through the vineyards at the Bouchaine winery in Napa, Calif., last month. (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)

BERKELEY, Calif. — Haute cuisine is going green in a program that recycles restaurant and household food scraps into high-grade compost for Northern California vineyards.

More than 2,200 restaurant or food businesses and 75,000 households in San Francisco are involved in the clean plate, clean environment plan, which has become a national model for food recycling. Scraps deposited in green plastic cans from Candlestick Park to Fisherman’s Wharf are converted into “Four Course Compost.”

The result is less waste in landfills, lower garbage pickup costs, vibrant vegetables — and a cheerful sense of completing a crop circle, a feeding-the-hand-that-feeds-you approach.

“Now you have restaurateurs that are excited about sending nutrients back to the farms and vineyards. That’s exciting stuff. That’s role reversal,” says Robert Reed of Norcal Waste Systems Inc., the San Francisco-based producers of Four Course.

Norcal Waste began looking into recycling food scraps in 1996, when the city of San Francisco asked for research on what was going into the landfill. They found that 19 percent of the material was food scraps and designed a program to capture that material and turn it into a marketable product.

The program takes food scraps from restaurants ranging from burger joints to some of the city’s swankiest, including Jardiniere and Boulevard.

“We love the program,” says Jonathan Cook, supervisor of operations at the Metreon, an entertainment complex in San Francisco that has eight restaurants supplying compost fodder. “It’s increased the morale in the kitchens. People feel they’re not throwing things out, they’re doing something good for the environment while they’re working.”

Along with the warm feelings, some cold cash. Metreon restaurants are saving about $1,600 in garbage pickup fees every month because of reduced volume, says Cook.

Growers like the program, too.

“I think it’s been fabulous,” says Kathleen Inman, owner and winemaker at Inman Family Vineyards in Sonoma County. The organic compost makes for healthy green vines, and it’s a kick to think of it as a movable feast with a possibly candlelit past, she says.

Californians throw away more than 5 million tons of food scraps each year, according to the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board. That amounts to 16 percent of materials going into landfills from businesses, residents, and institutions.

Nationally, it’s estimated that food scraps make up about 12 percent of the waste stream, says Kate Krebs, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition.